This year at ZendCon & OpenEnterprise, I had the chance to present on one of my favorite technologies, the Apache Camel routing and normalization framework.
In my opinion, Camel is one of the best ways to create sophisticated enterprise integration workflows. By combining a component-driven approach with an easy-to-understand syntax, Camel allows developers to federate various applications with minimal code.
Enterprise Integration Patterns
Camel was designed as a programmatic implementation of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). As an architectural design pattern, EIP defines code-agnostic workflows for common business tasks.